Making Robot Chicken

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Seth Green and the writers talk about the past, present and future of the show.

By Eric Goldman

Recently The Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) held a night honoring Robot Chicken. During a lively and funny Q&A co-creators Seth Green and Matt Senreich and other pivotal writers and producers from the show talked about how the stop-motion animated series came to be and what goes into its creation each week.

Senreich recalled how his relationship with Green began when he was at Wizard magazine and he "read in Entertainment Weekly that Seth was a big geek and thought it would make a great article." Green ended up writing an article for Wizard's sister publication ToyFare, and found that he and Senreich had very similar tastes. As Green noted, he was a big toy fanatic, or as he put it, the kind of guy you'd find "waiting at 6am for store to open with crates of new Star Wars toys."

When Green went on Conan O'Brien, he thought it would be fun to bring a stop motion short using action figures of himself (from Austin Powers) and O'Brien and spoke to Senreich about it, who brought in Tom Root and Doug Goldstein to collaborate, both of whom would end up becoming the two other core Robot Chicken writers. An early idea to "put Wizard on TV" was discarded, but the four ended up working together to create Web shorts for Sony's early online streaming service, and that project would eventually become Robot Chicken.

Green recalled pitching the show at Cartoon Network, where one of the executives, Mike Lazzo, said "I don't like stop motion, but I gotta admit, that show is funny." While they knew the show would include stop-motion animation centered around toys, Green credits Goldstein for coming up with the idea of the channel flips the show incorporates, which deftly allow for "Lots of jokes in a short amount of time." Goldstein recalled coming up with the idea while asking the question "What is the concept for the show? Are we going to have the Autobot symbol come forward and go back?"

The next step was finding a title, and Green said that many were considered, including ADD and Junk in the Trunk, the latter of which was nixed when they realized that if you do a Google search on those words "it's all ass porn," as Green explained. The term "Robot Chicken" came from a menu item at a Chinese restaurant Green, Senreich, Root and Goldstein were frequently ordering from. When Green noted that Lazzo said yes to that title right away, Cartoon Network's Keith Crofford, who was also part of the panel, nodded and quipped "We love robots."

The panel were asked if they had legal issues using toys on the show and they noted that they quickly learned the ins and outs of parody and what is allowed, with Green saying it's "all done in good fun." Senreich said they knew most companies were happy with the show when they "started getting toys right away." Goldstein said the key was asking themselves in the writers room "What is your statement here?" and to have a specific point or joke that made sense to the characters. However, he did remark that they have random moments where someone's whole statement could rest on an argument like "We always assumed Linus wanted to do Sally doggy style."